In present-day television receivers and in multimedia PCs (=personal computers), increasingly powerful processors are available for signal processing, so that it is possible simply by suitably programming the processors and with little additional circuitry to process a multitude of television standards with text, audio, and further information and to reproduce these standards on the existing output devices. Multimedia systems with high-resolution television or computer screens and powerful sound reproduction equipment offer particularly many possibilities of presentation and reproduction. The high data rate of the video data sources and the multitude of possible supplementary data place exacting requirements on the respective bus systems, which are generally implemented as parallel bus systems. For the different data streams, separate busses are used depending on clock rate and data capacity. Here, bottlenecks occur in multistandard television receivers and particularly in multimedia systems, because for each bit of the data to be transferred over a parallel bus, a respective package terminal is required at the transmitter and receiver ends, which are generally formed by monolithic integrated processors. However, the number of terminals available for bus connections is limited for reasons of cost, area, and wiring, and represents a major obstacle to the increasingly complex exchange of data between the individual processors.
It is therefore an object of the invention to provide for a digital television signal processing device, which may also be implemented as a multimedia processing device, a flexible bus system for video and supplementary data which can be adapted to different television standards and to different processing devices. In particular, the transmitter of the bus system is to be optimized in such a way as to be capable of cooperating both with existing, generally simple receivers and with highly flexible, complex receivers whose powerful processors are adaptable to the bus system without circuit modification simply by one-time programming.